A philosophy major at Stanford during World War II, Mae Brussell,
of Carmel Valley, was the great-granddaughter of Isaac Magnin
who founded I. Magnin's clothing stores. Her father, Edgar Magnin,
was a respected and well known Rabbi in Los Angeles. Mae might
well have been expected to enter the clothing or fashion industries,
or perhaps join the religious community, or even become a well-to-do
housewife. To have known Mae Brussell is to know that the expected
or accepted would be entirely out of the question.

From the tragically historic day in November of 1963, when
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, until a few weeks
before her death in October of 1988, Mae Brussell was a political
researcher, writer, radio commentator ... a searcher, a seeker
of the truth. She knew well the folly and the very real danger
in taking the expected and the accepted at face value.

Considered by some to be 'far out' or a 'kook', Mae had the
amazing courage and the incredible stamina necessary to champion
an unpopular cause against powerful opposition. By subscribing
to a large multitude of newspapers from all over the globe (which
she read from cover to cover) and by reading thousands of books
from many diverse viewpoints on subjects we would like to think
are unrelated  political assassinations, mind control,
fascism, the Mafia, and the Pentagon. She was able to correlate
assorted and isolated facts and put them together to show that
these things are very related! Mae looked at the Big Picture.

How she became interested in all of this is something most
of us can relate to. Like many Americans she smelled something
fishy in the way Kennedy's death was being explained by the authorities.
When Oswald was killed she HAD to start looking into it for herself.
As a mother of five children, she was concerned about what kind
of America they were inheriting. Mae absolutely loved her country,
yet she did not like some of the things some people were doing
to it, especially "in the name of patriotism!" She
said, "I have to care what America does to other people."

It struck Mae that it was extremely significant that such
an intense DIS-information effort was being waged in the wake
of Kennedy's death. She asked herself  What can I do about
it? What can anybody do about it? She asked her fellow Americans
 How can you sit back and swallow this? And she asked many
of our leaders  Who do you think you're kidding? In the
26 years that followed, Mae Brussell's name rose into international
prominence as a leading political theorist. She was careful to
report only what she could prove, as outlandish as her statements
might sound.

She began broadcasting a live weekly radio program "Dialogue
Conspiracy" in 1971 on Carmel's KLRB FM which eventually
went belly up while Mae Brussell was still going strong. Her
show moved to public radio KAZU FM in Pacific Grove, under the
new name "World Watcher". Every show was taped and
catalogued. Other stations around the country began to pick up
the program and broadcast from the tapes. She also wrote for
various national magazines beginning with "Why Was Martha
Mitchell Kidnapped?", in the Realist. She taught an accredited
class in Conspiracy Theory and Analysis at Monterey Peninsula
College in the '70's, and lectured across the country.

Mae was chronicling the exploits of Lt. Col. Oliver North
years before the name and face of "Ollie" were forever
printed in our minds, courtesy of the "handled" media
coverage of the Iran-Contra hearings. Most of the other names
are not anywhere nearly as well known.... most of the people
didn't get caught  of those caught few were tried, and
of those tried how many will be convicted? Basically, if it isn't
front page stuff it isn't real news. Statistics show that not
many people read very far beyond the first page of their newspaper,
and of those that do, an alarming amount read only the first
paragraph of any given article.

Mae is said to have read over 30 newspapers daily  thoroughly.
She had her fingers on the pulse of the dragon. The dragon probably
did not have a particularly fond feeling for that finger. In
an interview Mae once said "If you study every (presidential)
election since 1960  it's sabotaging a hostage rescue plan,
or stealing debate-briefing papers, or bullets or blackmail."
Pesky finger that. This year we had armed, uniformed guards at
some polls (LA), sudden death of John Mitchell, and CIA Director,
William Casey.

Mae Brussell later remarked on how healthy Mr. Casey looked
on T.V. and in the courtroom just days before he suddenly was
stricken. "This does not look like a man who is going to
die of a brain tumor." Yet he did die in less than a week,
reportedly from brain cancer. In regard to Casey's death Mae
also said, "The CIA brags about the hundreds of ways they
have to kill people. Frank Terpil said he could go down an airplane
aisle and brush something on someone's coat and within 3 days
it seeps through ... and there's no trace of anything. Why have
an old man bring down the institution  shold he possibly
break under final cross-examination. If you saw Casey walking
down the hall and grinning, and talking, and giving interviews
 and the next day he was going to testify. And he's in
his own building when he had those seizures  then he's
put into an ambulance and never seen again! The fact that he
was never seen again, and the circumstances of his robustness
of the day before his testimony ... The man was not thinking
or walking like a person with a brain tumor."

As a quick introduction to some major members of the "Secret
Team" that Mae began to not only adroitly identify, but
also, pin down their team position ... do the names Richard Secord,
John Singlaub, Thomas Clines, Theodore Shackley or Fritz Kraemer
mean anything to you? Have you noticed any peculiar connections?
Richard Secord is a senior Air Force General, John Singlaub 
a highly placed Army General, and both are identified with official
Joint Chiefs of Staff decisions. Thomas Clines and Theodore Shackley
both are former CIA operatives specifically involved with clandestine
operations (most of which are so covert that the Congress was
never informed.)

Fritz Kraemer for many years was Plans Officer at the Pentagon.
Mae identified him as "Number One" most powerful person
in the United States. She suspected that he was the very same
Fritz Kraemer who was very high up in Hitler's regime and personally
responsible for extremely strategic fascist atrocities in WWII.
Mae believed they were the same man, but she never had any solid
evidence and she always made the distinction between supposition
and proven fact. All of these men are identified as being major
players in what Mae, and increasingly more, political analysts
have called "The Secret Team". Mae believed and was
prominent in the movement to prove the existence of a covert
power group comprised of military, and more significantly, major
corporate business concerns. They (the Secret Team) are a chain
of wide-ranging, long standing, government over-riding (sometimes
usurping) corporations and governmental structures throughout
the Western "Free World" sphere of influence. Generally
they operated within, and/or in the crevices of, the U.S. government
heirarchy.

If this is new to you it must sound fairly, if not very, far-fetched.
That's today perhaps. Mae had found that among those who might
stop to listen  the more one hears about these hidden movements,
the more one wants to know. Truth is usually self-perpetuating,
and it takes major efforts to side-track it. She had uncovered
and proven the involvement of the Secret Team in the killing
of Chilean leader Allende, among other covert activities including
the bombing of Libya last year and the Australian Nugan Bank
scandal.

Because of her outspoken views, and the fact that she made
them so publicly available, she had received a number of death
threats over the last two decades. Subsequent to a telephone
threat in 1970, a very mysterious automobile accident claimed
the life of her much loved daughter Bonnie, and the Carmel High
School dance teacher. Another daughter, Barbara, was seriously
injured. The accident took place outside of Ford Ord (U.S. Army
training facility) on Highway One. The station wagon that rammed
their vehicle was identified but never apprehended.

A life that included much personal tragedy also contained
many important triumphs as well. As one of a handful of researchers
working through the maze of dis-information, distortions, and
cover-ups, she looked into stories that no one dared touch. She
was a champion of truth and justice  The American way.
If justice and truth still mean anything, history will remember
Mae Brussell as an important woman, real patriot and heroine.
She was these things and she was loved for it. Thank you Mae.